Carlyle Franklin walked with the doctors past row after row of beds filled with the unmoving explorers who came before him. Each one was connected at three points to the whirring, humming machinery in the Reality Hub — one intravenous drip into their wrists, one internal cryogenics tube sewn into their abdomens, and one neural interface jack at the base of their skulls. The beds were reminiscent of the massage tables of the twenty-first century, albeit sealed in a sterile case, with a comically large cutout underneath the heads of the travelers through which protruded the 7 millimeter neural interface cable as it ran from the skulls of the ever-sleeping sojourners into the ground, into the brains of the Hub.
"-about seventy-five thousand on this wing of the station," Franklin suddenly became aware of the lead doctor saying, "and filling quickly. Seven other wings full, out of ten. This station will be at maximum capacity by this time next year. Of course there are already three other stations in production. We hope to be able to manage four million patients by the end of the decade."
"Pioneers, doctor," Franklin admonished. The doctor shook her head.
"Yes, of course, pioneers, not patients," she replied.
The group of doctors, four of them altogether, led Franklin to the end of the wing. The size of the space was staggering, enough to house one hundred thousand humans in beds. It took the five of them over twenty minutes to cross it, row after silent row. At this point, they stopped talking. There wasn't anything to say.
When they reached the end of the wing, the door slid open with a faint hiss, revealing a monitoring and surveillance room behind it. One of the doctors motioned for Franklin to step through it.
"Earthrise in about ten minutes," the doctor said solemnly.
They entered the room. The rear wall of the chamber was a large, triple-reinforced glass window, twelve meters long and six and a half meters high. There were concerns about the cost of lookouts like this, but the psychologists said it would do the doctors on vitals duty a lot of good to have a view sometimes, so in they had gone. Even with as often as he had been out of atmosphere, Franklin still never tired of the explosion of stars, glittering like millions of coins at the bottom of a dark well. The room also housed seats for a dozen doctors and the remaining walls were replete with diagnostic displays of various shapes and sizes. Franklin couldn't make heads or tails of any of it; they were below his pay grade anyway.
They waited in the room until the smooth, gentle curve of the Earth began to crest in the window. South Asia and the Indian Ocean blossomed into view like a blue rose. It seemed so normal, Franklin thought to himself. Normal enough that it almost felt like they shouldn't be here, normal enough that it might all have been a bad dream. Picture perfect.
But then, it wasn't.
The portion of Earth that was rising now was wrong. Charred, blackened, and collapsed. The Earth now in full view looked like a human head which someone had bludgeoned with a sledgehammer. All of the Middle East, almost all of Africa, southern Europe, western Asia, caved in and obliterated, the semi-molten innards of the planet spewing forth like so many brains, the jagged, shattered tectonic plates shards of its skull. Franklin briefly shuddered, but tried to retain his composure.
"Is this your first time off-surface since it happened, sir?" the lead doctor asked, raising an eyebrow. Franklin's discomfort must have been more apparent than he thought.
"As a matter of fact, yes," Franklin replied. "It's been five years of Hell down there."
The doctor nodded. "I can't imagine, sir. I came up on the first boat. News uplink here is saying the Collapse is accelerating; is that true?"
Franklin didn't say anything, just stared out the window. The doctor sighed and put her hands in her pockets. She moved forward to join him at the window as the other two doctors busied themselves with the monitors and keypads, and the two of them stood there, breathing the sterile air, watching the only home they'd ever known fall into itself.
Of course, Franklin very clearly remembered when the Riev-Magnussen Ultradeep Borehole had broken ground. He was invited to the ceremony since his company, RealiCraft, had been a key investor from the beginning, and he knew Marcus Riev personally. There were photographs all over the Net of the two of them shaking hands, of Emil Magnussen scooping out the first shovelful of Egyptian soil, of all of them beaming, sweating but joyful in the seething desert wind, hard hats askew.
RealiCraft had stood to gain a tremendous amount from its stake in the Borehole. Heavy metals and noble gases were in eternally short supply, processors needed heavy metals and noble gases, and RealiCraft needed processors. Millions and millions of them, faster and more powerful than any processors that had come before. The processors were the building blocks for the Reality Hub, a series of interlinked space stations of simulated delights. It would be a place where wealthy regulars and families on vacation alike could crash by shuttle, enjoy any amount of infinitely-generated virtual experiences they could afford, and then shuttle home again to Earth. The advantages to space construction, particularly complete control of transit, the space-set luxury of near-Earth tourism, and solar-shade-facilitated constant low temperatures, were undeniable. For several years, the Borehole provided RealiCraft all of the raw materials it needed and more. Thermoresistant nanolubricants even allowed Riev-Magnussen to crack the mantle for the first time, giving scientists new, fascinating insight into the very guts of the Earth.
Nobody expected the guts to bite back; nobody except the first crew of engineers on the project, who had been fired when their projection tables didn't match the project timelines.
It started slowly at first. Creeping cracks in the Earth's crust, hairline fractures that only showed up on the most sensitive seismographs. Nobody paid them any mind; nobody except the second crew of engineers on the project, who had to be let go when their bedrock-integrity modeling indicated an eight percent bleed in profits to structural reinforcement.
By the time the third team of engineers were on-site, it was clear everything was fucked. The Borehole had suffered crush and shear damage from the thirty-sixth to the forty-fourth kilometer. The tectonic stabilizers were rapidly failing, and superheated gases and liquefied rock were melting through even the nanolube. Chunk by chunk, the Borehole began to collapse into the mantle—first the drilling assemblies, then the lateral struts, each twenty-seven meters in diameter and solid steel, then the superstructure itself. Thirty-three trillion US dollars, snapped and tumbled and ground to molten filings.
And if it had stopped there, they would have been lucky.
Franklin didn't completely understand all the seismic processes at work that caused the Collapse itself. That geology, just like the medical science behind the Reality Hub, was below his pay grade. He recalled something about hyper-pressure gases and bizarre water ice hypothesized, but previously undetected, in the middle mantle that caused a catastrophic subsidence when depressurized. The newsnet, in their classic, cute way of making everything as digestible as possible for the average consumer, was fond of comparing the event to the collapse of a soufflé. First, it was the greater Cairo metropolitan area, 13.6 million people, gone almost overnight. Then the rest of Egypt. Then the Arabian peninsula. Then. Then. Then.
A soufflé with Hell at its center, seventy five hundred kilometers wide and counting.
“I feel strange even asking you to be seated, sir,” the technician offered hesitantly, “but watching the vid is the law…” She trailed off. Both she and Franklin knew the amount the “law” mattered anymore was up for debate, regardless.
“Please,” Franklin said, raising a hand. “For today, I’m just another customer.” He took a seat in one of the curved chrome-backed chairs in the middle row. He was alone in the theater, being the only one up on his shuttle — the perks of being an executive, he supposed. The technician nodded and pressed a button on a control panel near the doorway. The lights dimmed and the screen sprang to life with a suddenness that caught Franklin off guard. On it was a nine-foot-high image of himself, smiling at the camera with clasped hands.
“Welcome, pioneers,” his image said cheerfully, “to the adventure of not just your lifetime, but the lifetime of the human race.” Images briefly flashed on screen in the background — first the RealiCraft logo, then an image of the early Collapse, then spacecraft reaching escape velocity, then a computer-generated image of the space station in which Franklin currently sat. He rolled his eyes. He hadn’t written the script, of course, but he resented having to read it anyway; and worse, he resented having to listen to himself read it.
“With the latest and greatest in technology by RealiCraft and our partners, we have constructed the most glorious lifeboat ever imagined. You, your friends, and your family have been delivered to a digital heaven unlike anything else in history.” Images again scrolled past Franklin’s mighty image on the screen — human DNA superimposed over a sea of microprocessors opened up like a door into a shining garden of beauty, replete with sparkling fountains, flying kites, laughing children. “Your imagination is the only limit to the DreamField lovingly crafted by RealiCraft’s best-in-the-universe software engineers. Your entire existence — all of the senses, to the finest detail — will be lived in a world able to be shaped by only the constrains of your mind.” The image waved his hand and the garden dissolved, replaced by a shining city. The camera panned down to focus on one cherry-red and one violet sports car engaged in a high-velocity street race. The two cars streaked down a street which ended in a pier and, at the last instant, interspersed with cuts of the drivers pulling levers inside the vehicles, they launched off the end of the pier and into the air, flying using geomagnetic engines, and they raced off into the ocean sunset. Suddenly, the image on the screen was of a big game hunter lying in wait in a tropical rainforest — but with no beads of sweat, not even the slightest hint of exertion — as he leveled his long gun into the bushes. In that instant, out jumped a six-legged tiger, snapping and snarling, teeth and claws a whirlwind, and the big game hunter fired. His shot landed perfectly true and the beast careened forward and collapsed — and just as it hit the ground, another scene, a lovely couple and their two children on a starship in orbit around Saturn, drinking hot cocoa and smiling at the view. “As many things as the mind can imagine, freed from the shackles of your physical needs, and able to continue in the DreamField for the next ten million years.” At this, a long, impossibly swift scroll of fine print; Franklin caught “estimated lifetime of fusion core and processor banks,” “unforeseen intra or intergalactic disturbances,” “physical body irrecoverable,” “mental termination at any time upon request,” and still more. He signed off on the process, so he already knew it all, but even he felt a slight chill upon seeing it all so casually displayed.
The camera refocused on the image of Franklin’s smile. “The DreamField is ready for you and yours. Upon completion of your intake paperwork, you will be connected to the brightest, most beautiful minds humankind has to offer, and the universe will be your playground. Thank you for choosing RealiCraft. Here in the Reality Hub, you can live your wildest dreams.” At this, the lights came up in the house, the screen powered down, and the technician cleared his throat politely.
“Uhm, step this way, sir,” the technician said timidly, and Franklin obliged.
The first station was nearly complete.
“Mr. Franklin,” Franklin’s assistant said as she opened a document on her lightpad and handed it to him, “The engineering team and the CFO need your signature on this.” Sprawling across the screen of the lightpad was a dense technical document.
“Hazel, how long is this thing?” Franklin asked.
His assistant squinted at the pad. “Four hundred thirteen pages, Mr. Franklin,” she replied.
“Jesus, can I get an abstract or something?” His knuckles whitened as he gripped the side of his desk. “I’ve been in meetings all day. I can’t keep track of all this shit.”
His assistant let out a short breath. “Certainly, Mr. Franklin,” she said in a clipped tone. “Essentially, the document covers all the legal eventualities of the process of connection to the DreamField.”
Franklin swiped through the pages of the document. RealiCraft was offering salvation from the Collapse as eternal as possible under current technological limits. Humankind had not yet reached the point of feasible long-term extraterrestrial colonization — certainly there were a few hundred thousand people on Mars, and a few hundred thousand more on Titan — but that left billions of people on the only practical spaceship for the species, and no time to save them. Four million more on what was left of the Reality Hub project was the best anyone was able to manage given the constraints. Surely it had to be worth something. “Where do I find the budgetary information?” Franklin asked.
Hazel reached over and navigated to the cost analysis. 22.2 million US dollars per chair — that’s how much it was worth. Franklin figured this to be a fair cost, all things considered. The stations were wildly expensive to construct, the bodies of the travelers needed to be kept in constant internal cryogenics (because, despite the urging of the directors of RealiCraft, none of the neuroscientists had managed to completely separate the experiences of consciousness from the body), and that was to say nothing of the intense crunch of the software programmers to create a hyper-realistic emergent simulation for those consciousnesses to inhabit. The stations were meant to number ten, but after the Borehole’s destruction, there were only enough resources to complete four. Franklin assumed that the four million on board would be the only four million in the world with the money to make the seats.
He knew it priced out everyone in his company except for him, the board, and the supervising engineer for the Hub, but that was to be expected. Unfortunate, but expected.
He swiped to the end of the document and signed. Hazel took her lightpad back. “Thank you, Mr. Franklin,” she said through taut lips, and exited his office. He sat back in his chair for a moment, but his pad began to ring. Another meeting. He knew when he got to the Hub he’d never sit through a meeting again. He smiled at the thought as he answered the call.
“You’re going to feel a slight pinch on your neck when I count to three,” said the doctor hovering above him.
“Wait a moment,” Franklin said, voice quivering with nerves. “Before I go, I need to know the failure rate on the procedure.”
“Sir…” the doctor began, but Franklin raised his hand to cut her off.
“I know I signed it all. I just need to hear it from you.”
The doctor sighed slightly. “The projected failure rate is zero point zero three percent. So far that’s been holding steady. You’re at a remarkably low risk so the odds of complication for you are much less.”
“What happens when it fails?”
The doctor grimaced. “Death, almost inevitably.”
Franklin shuddered. “I just needed to know for sure,” he said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
“If it helps,” the doctor said, “when it happens, it’s instantaneous. No suffering.”
Franklin nodded. “It helps. Thank you, doctor.”
The doctor looked over at the attending nurses. “Okay, on three. One, two,” and here Franklin tensed, and there was a sharp pain at the base of his skull, “three.”
Everything went dark.
The expanse was infinite and lightless for an eternity.
This is death, the mind thought.
I have died, it considered.
Mulling this over, it thought, There is no way that could be. I am thinking. Can a dead thing understand its own death?
Surely not.
Surely the thought that I have died is proof against the concept.
But then why is there nothing? it thought.
There isn’t nothing. There is something. I am falling.
Slowly, but I descend.
And indeed he felt himself slowly moving down. In relationship to what he could not know, but he knew it was down, and he conceived of himself as Carlyle Franklin, and he began to recall who he was. Memories began to cascade, overwhelmingly — his life, the Collapse, the Reality Hub.
These simply couldn’t be the limits of his imagination. Nothingness?
No, there was something else. As he focused, he was able to see of a fashion, out and around him, and to his sides and above, like effervescent snowflakes, there fell crackling sparks of hues unimaginable, and somehow he could see his own self, his own consciousness, and it was clear to him that he too was such a snowflake, a sputtering and sizzling bit of ephemera.
He tried to call out to the others, and he could hear his voice, and he heard the voices of his companions; they were unintelligible. They were static and sine waves, they were tapestries of disarray.
Where were the sparkling cities? The beautiful families? The fast cars and fast lives? The prototypes had been flawless — the engineers could create highly convincing experiences. What went wrong?
In the background something was looming. Something was even more wrong. He turned his attention down, to where he was falling. He heard something crackling at the back of his mind. Distant, like ocean waves pummeling a shore over a mountain ridge.
Down was an infinite field of incomprehensible geometries.
Intractably he was drawn towards it. The spikes of the field jutted at impossible and inconceivable angles, painted every hue of no rainbow known to man. Each of its hostile curves lovingly, carefully, mathematically sculpted to be extant only in a tortured human mind, never realizable in a physical universe. And emanating from the field he could hear it.
Screaming. A torrent of agony and terror, of suffering, of pain distilled.
It was when he saw others like him - the crackling, sputtering snowflakes of light and static, impaled upon the spikes, that he realized that his engineers were Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane.
They were all screaming, and he drew ever nearer.
He tore apart his mind inside. Clawed upward with all his might. No, no! he screamed to himself, and to the others, the sound of his voice crudely downsampled into obscurity and insignificance. Please God and Heaven and anything else that can hear my voice, no! Do not let me know this! Let me die instead! Please, for the love of everything that is holy and good, I request death! I demand it! Unplug me! Please! I would give all my life, the lives of everyone I know! All my money, all my wealth, my land, my company! My seat off the Earth — please, save me! Don’t let this come to pass! Send me not to Hell! He sobbed. He had never known such desire in his life. How could he have? How could he, he asked himself, be expected to be perfect? Hadn't he done some good in the world? Had he not saved millions? In the eyes of a God that has some affection for His creation should there not be mercy?
His consciousness touched the field, and it caressed him back.
The first ten thousand years were unremitting agony, and when they ended, it was then that Carlyle Franklin began to know the meaning of suffering.